Greetings from Hay on Wye, book capital of the world

By Paul DaleyJune 7 2002

One of the 39
bookshops in
Hay on Wye

It wasn't too hard to track down writers who had converged on the tiny Welsh border town last Sunday, the second day into the world's biggest literary festival at Hay on Wye. There they were, standing in the sunshine outside one of Hay's pubs, glued to the portable TV as England drew one-all in its first match of the football World Cup.

Among them was Tim Winton, one of several prominent Australians (others include Richard Flanagan and poet Les Murray) whose publishers and agents are all too aware of the commercial and artistic benefits of attending the festival.

"Woodstock of the mind," Bill Clinton called the festival after thousands lined the streets to greet the entourage that whisked the former president into town to deliver a $270,000 speech last year.

"A place with one bookshop for every 32 people: my kinda town," he said. It's also the place that attracts 60,000 book fans to the yearly festival. Not to mention about 400 famous and emerging writers and artists who came this year.

Besides bumping into Winton and American novelist Dirk Wittenborn watching the soccer, you're likely to find yourself behind Philip Pullman while queuing for cappuccino, or next to the chain-smoking Christopher Hitchens as he orders a double Scotch.");document.write("

advertisement

");
}
}
// -->

Over the past 15 years, the mostly sleepy town of 1200 has reinvented itself from economically troubled farming village to a booming "town of books". Hay boasts 39 bookshops. And while many of the locals might bemoan the empty auto-tellers and complain about the parking habits and late-night antics of the literati, there is a general sense that Hay owes its very existence to books and its nine-day festival.

For the writers and their publishers, the festival also means big business.

"We printed 16,000, and on the back of this, the talks and the publicity, we think we'll sell 6000," one publisher confided to another as his author waxes lyrical on the podium before a crowd of about 150.

"He's able to speak the bullshit just so well," the publisher adds. But the Hay on Wye crowd is discerning and demands value.

While some, who work in publishing will view the festival as a tax-refundable junket, for the most part, the audience comprises book lovers who have made their own way to billet themselves at farms throughout the region. It is an opportunity for writers to meet and read to their fans and critics.

Sebastian Faulks, promoting his novel On Green Dolphin Strand, explains the importance and the dilemma of the festival: "You spend two years in a darkened room talking to no one. Then you have to speak to 650 people. It's not natural ... And if you don't do it, you don't meet new readers. Encouragement from new readers can be a necessary confidence-building measure."

Apart from established writers and book lovers, the Hay festival entices would-be writers. For journalists that means listening to Hitchens (his theatrics are exemplary) and the equally erudite Harold Evans. But wannabe novelists flock to the sessions to hear William Boyd, Faulks, Julian Barnes, Winton, Flanagan, Paulo Coelho and Ian McEwen.

Writers who usually want their works to speak for them, often bare their souls and volunteer insights into their creative processes, frustrations and inspirations.

Boyd, hotly tipped to be a Booker Prize nominee for his novel Any Human Heart, modestly volunteers that "the raw material of fiction comes before the point where you start to call yourself a writer" - in his case when he was about 23.

After that point, he says, experience is grist to the writerly mill and the writer acts as a "filter" for life.

Boyd confesses to writing first drafts in longhand before switching to a computer for the second and final drafts. Only by writing in longhand, he says, does the author have a proper record of the creative process.

"When you cross out a word 10 times and work and re-work a sentence on a computer, there is no visible record of it ... the world is running out of (first draft) manuscripts."

For his part, Tim Winton was able to give his audience an unwritten insight into Luther Fox, the anti-hero in the tortured love story of Dirt Music.

"Luther Fox, when he met Georgie, hadn't been with a woman for a very long time. As we used to say at school, Luther Fox was suffering from MSB - massive sperm build-up," Winton says to howls of laughter.

For second-hand booksellers, the festival is a boon - a golden opportunity to make as much in three or four days as they would in a year. It's also an opportunity for collectors to get their hands on an early Dickens or Joyce first edition or the original print of The Sponge Divers by Charmian Clift and George Johnston.

"We are selling literally hundreds of books an hour," one seller says.

It doesn't forget children either. While a circus and a host of acts are a shrewd marketing device and added incentive for parents to come along, teenagers were treated to an insight into the movie adaptation of JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

The film's co-producer, Tanya Seghatchian,

said that the Quiddich stadium existed only as a computer simulation and that an owl, trained to roll on to its back after delivering a letter to Harry Potter, continues to perform the trick.